Nursing Home Abuse

[Tired_Old_Man 1]

I want to talk about one of the most disgusting things I know of in 21st Century America: THE CONDITIONS THAT EXIST IN NURSING HOMES.

My father-in-law died after a 8 year stay in a nursing home in 1995, my step-father died after a 6 year stay in 1999 and my mother-in-law is in a nursing home for 3 years now.

These people were and are being abused by being deprived of the most basic of care; food and Water.

Let me digress. During the last year or so of my father-in-law's stay, my Wife, Tina and I were often visiting both her father and my step-father on the same day. We noticed on a few occasions that nurses would duck away from us. Curious as to why, we made it a point to see who was avoiding us. We found out that at my step-father's nursing home, it was nurses we knew from my father-in-law's home and vice-versa. These nurses were working full-time jobs at both homes. The homes were not affiliated in any way.

Add it up, if a person works two 40 hour a week jobs and makes sure that she has different days off on each job, she still has to work both jobs on 3 days each week. If she works an 8 hour shift plus 30 minutes off for lunch, and if it takes 30 minutes to get to her first job, 30 minutes to go between jobs and 30 minutes to get home, that only leaves 4:30 for washing, getting dressed, getting undressed and sleeping.

My step-father's home was in one borough (Queens) of NYC and and my father-in-law's was in another borough (Brooklyn).

The problems this causes are immense. Today, I called a Nursing Home advocacy group in NYC, because my mother-in-law is in the hospital in serious condition and I wanted to check on the advocacy group's rating of my mother-in-law's nursing home. As soon as I said, my mother-in-law was in the hospital, the advocacy group phone rep asked, “Urinary Infection?”

How did she know? She said she could not answer, but when I suggested the reason, she agree with my assessment. The nurses are too tired to change the resident's diapers regularly, so they withhold Water, juices, Soup, lettuce (salad), fruits and Jello, anything consisting mainly of water that would cause urination more often.

I do not want to come off as anti-nurse. Nurses, by and large are the unappreciated backbone of the medical profession of the United States. Low pay and over-reaching for the American dream have caused many nurses to overextend themselves financially and time wise.

My father-in-law was physically abused by attendants who always claimed he fell out of bed. Black eyes are not “falling out of bed” injuries. The problem of physical abuse makes the news every so often, but this hydration abuse is much more prevalent and may be killing our parents and grandparents.

My wife has been crying all day. She only got back from a two week stay in NY last week and she is heading back again next week, right after she sees her cardiologist. We live in Florida where nursing homes are terrible, so we can't even think of bringing her here. But in NYC, which is supposed to have better quality nursing homes, things are falling apart.

It looks like my brother-in-law may have to hire a private nurse to come in and make sure my mother-in-law gets food and water, and gets her diapers changed. She has Alzheimer's, as did her husband. My step-father was a multiple stroke victim. Both of the men had constant urinary infections. My step-father was in a home that cost him $93,000 a year. He was not doing it on the cheap.

[Ariel 1]

Is it the nurses or the aids? If it is the nurses are they RN's or LPN's? I am very sorry to hear about that.I had a very similar experience with my grandmother. We had to put her in a nursing home, and several times she had to be hospitialized for dehydration which i found unacceptable. To this day i believe it was thier lack of care that caused her death.

[Tired_Old_Man 1]

Is it the nurses or the aids? If it is the nurses are they RN's or LPN's? I am very sorry to hear about that.I had a very similar experience with my grandmother. We had to put her in a nursing home, and several times she had to be hospitialized for dehydration which i found unacceptable. To this day i believe it was thier lack of care that caused her death.

I am sorry to hear about your grandmother. I hope that my post can help jump-start a letter writing campaign to our elected officials.

Regarding the nurses; I don't know what their rankings are. In NY, they have changed the old titles over the last few years, but as long as they wear the uniform and want to be addressed as nurse, I don't care what their designation is.

They should be giving our loved ones proper hydration.

Today, it is the lives of our parents and grandparents being shortened and made miserable by lack of care. Tomorrow it will be our turn to suffer from hunger, thirst and infection.

[BJean 16]

My MIL is currently in a rehabilitative nursing home. She's been there almost 2 weeks after a 3 week stay in a hospital due to a stroke she had just before Christmas. She still has all of her speech and mental faculties.

They have dropped her twice. Once, fortunately on her bed as they were bringing her back from rehab and a wheelchair. The second time, they dropped her in the floor as they were putting her in the wheelchair. They claimed that the wheelchair was defective. It wasn't. The doctor that came to see if she had cuts, bruises or broken bones, told my FIL that "these things happen."

It isn't as if my MIL is a heavy person. She weighs 110 lbs. We are thankful that she is able to tell us what kind of care that she's receiving. This is a well thought of and highly recommended facility.

My SIL's grandfather, a healthy robust 84 yr. old, had a problem knee. Didn't keep him from being active, but was painful. They had an Alaskan cruise planned and he decided to go ahead and have the recommended knee replacement so that he would be more comfortable on the trip.

He had the knee replaced and everything post-op was great. Then they put him in a nursing home temporarily for rehab. He immediately contracted a staph infection in the knee replacement which rapidly raced throughout his entire body. The pain was unbearable. He only stopped screaming when he was completely medicated with morphine. They wound up replacing the knee replacement and did other things that no human being should have to endure and by June he was dead. At that point, his wife was thanking God that he was out of the indiscribable pain. She is still in shock.

In interviewing nursing homes for my MIL recently I discovered that many nursing homes, even rehabilitative up-scale ones, do not have a nurse for each wing. They have an aide of some sort. I do not know what their training consists of but there is a granddaughter in the family who is 21 and has been working as an aide in a nursing home for over 3 years. She didn't finish high school, so I have a feeling that the training they get is not too advanced.

TOM if you could come up with a grand scheme that would solve some of these nursing home problems, all of society would be in your debt.

[Tired_Old_Man 1]

My MIL is currently in a rehabilitative nursing home. She's been there almost 2 weeks after a 3 week stay in a hospital due to a stroke she had just before Christmas. She still has all of her speech and mental faculties.

They have dropped her twice. Once, fortunately on her bed as they were bringing her back from rehab and a wheelchair. The second time, they dropped her in the floor as they were putting her in the wheelchair. They claimed that the wheelchair was defective. It wasn't. The doctor that came to see if she had cuts, bruises or broken bones, told my FIL that "these things happen."

It isn't as if my MIL is a heavy person. She weighs 110 lbs. We are thankful that she is able to tell us what kind of care that she's receiving. This is a well thought of and highly recommended facility.

My SIL's grandfather, a healthy robust 84 yr. old, had a problem knee. Didn't keep him from being active, but was painful. They had an Alaskan cruise planned and he decided to go ahead and have the recommended knee replacement so that he would be more comfortable on the trip.

He had the knee replaced and everything post-op was great. Then they put him in a nursing home temporarily for rehab. He immediately contracted a staph infection in the knee replacement which rapidly raced throughout his entire body. The pain was unbearable. He only stopped screaming when he was completely medicated with morphine. They wound up replacing the knee replacement and did other things that no human being should have to endure and by June he was dead. At that point, his wife was thanking God that he was out of the indiscribable pain. She is still in shock.

In interviewing nursing homes for my MIL recently I discovered that many nursing homes, even rehabilitative up-scale ones, do not have a nurse for each wing. They have an aide of some sort. I do not know what their training consists of but there is a granddaughter in the family who is 21 and has been working as an aide in a nursing home for over 3 years. She didn't finish high school, so I have a feeling that the training they get is not too advanced.

TOM if you could come up with a grand scheme that would solve some of these nursing home problems, all of society would be in your debt.

Money is the start of the solution. Greed is the problem. Marketing causes the need for greed. Nobody is ever satisfied with what they have.

I keep hearing that people have to work two jobs to make ends meet.

But the funny part of that is I hear it from people making $10 an hour, I hear it from people making $20 an hour and I hear it from people making $30 an hour.

Last week, I was listening to the news and they were interviewing a ball-player who was bargaining to renegotiate his contract. He already was making over $20,000,000 a year, but he wanted $25,000,000.

I wonder if we could get the nursing homes to pay more money to the nurses if it would help? I think it might attract more nurses. We need to cut the ratio of residents to staff down to a lower number by state laws and then have pay commensurate to attract enough staff.

A problem is that much of the money paid to nursing homes comes from the government and the government doesn't want to raise taxes, nor spend money for this purpose. I think I will go crazy if I hear about them building a nursing home in Iraq.

More surprise spot checks by inspectors would help. I was at my step-father's nursing home a few years before he died and I overheard the head nurse telling her subordinates that there was going to be a state inspection on the next day. So of course everything was being made to sparkle. Surprise inspections more often is what we need, but that cost tax dollars again. I guess we can forget about that.

I hope we will be able to remember how proud we were voting for the candidate who promised "No new taxes", when we are laying there in agony, our mouths parched, our lips cracking, our skin itching, our diapers soaked and soiled, and our urethra burning.

[edieparks 2]

Just to add something positive, my Mom put herself in a wonderful Home May of 06. I asked her if she was sure. She says yes, you have to "walk in on your own" to get into this home and I want to live THERE . It is run by nuns and she is so happy. My mom is only 67 . I consider myself lucky. I am a only child and never had to make "that decision".

I agree that good homes are few and inbetween. Everyone is usually over worked or not the least bit interested and underpaid.

edie

[BJean 16]

TOM I agree with all of your suggestions for solving some of the problems. I have a friend who worked in a nursing home and her advice to me has always been do not put anyone you love in a nursing home. She took care of her mother at home until she died. She took care of her husband's mother and his aunt until they died. She's a better man than I am. I feel like a real heel admitting that, but it is the way of the land these days. In the old days, people's families lived together and they took care of each other. Today we're all so mobile in our jobs, we don't even live in the same state most of the time.

edie: your Mom took the bull by the horns and was proactive about her life as she ages. I'm impressed. We need to all be realistic and make some decisions while we can still make decisions. We shouldn't leave it to our children to have to make decisions that will cause everyone such heartache. Unless you're like my friend Liz, and resigned to the fact that taking care of old people is your lot in life.

This thread makes me very sad. It doesn't help that I'm not that much younger than edie's mother.

[Tired_Old_Man 1]

Just to add something positive, my Mom put herself in a wonderful Home May of 06. I asked her if she was sure. She says yes, you have to "walk in on your own" to get into this home and I want to live THERE . It is run by nuns and she is so happy. My mom is only 67 . I consider myself lucky. I am a only child and never had to make "that decision".

I agree that good homes are few and inbetween. Everyone is usually over worked or not the least bit interested and underpaid.

edie

I think you are describing an assisted living center, rather than a nursing home.

In the type of homes that I was referring to, people spend most of their time either in bed or in wheel-chairs. Those that walk, do so very slowly.

I am about five years younger than you mother. I'll be 62 in a couple of months.

[Wheetsin 714]

I worked for a nursing home. I was the habilitation director, fancy title for "it was my job to come up with activities and exercises for people to do". So I wasn't really involved with the consumers directly, but I saw. And I heard. What can I say, I was 19 and it paid well.

But I'll say this with complete honesty - after seeing not just the way people were treated, though that's certainly a part of it - but the things that were said about them away from earshot, and the "jokes" that people would play, the way that property was disrespected, and the way that these people were ridiculed, and on, and on... And beyond that, they degree to which the people hated the place, and hated their jobs, and hated the residents, and hated everything about the place... I don't care what the expense is to me, my parents will never - NEVER - be in a nursing home as long as I'm alive and able to care for them.

[Wheetsin 714]

BTW, I never enjoyed that job. Not a thing about it. I was only there a very brief time. There was something about walking in the doors, and knowing that everyone you saw was there to die.

[anonemouse 1]

When I was in high school, I was in a class where we could get clinical experience in health care settings. One of the places I was at was a local nursing home. It was absolutely horrible. The workers there were generally not very educated and obviously unhappy working there. I can remember a couple times that I was just horrified by the way the patients were treated. One of the patients was a relatively young man that had had a stroke. They had to give him laxatives regularly because he couldn't have a BM on his own. They wouldn't put him in adult daipers, so they would literally let him crap all over his bed. Every time they gave him a laxative, that was what would happen. They would drag him out of bed and put him in a shower chair and roll him down the hallway to the shower room. They would put a gown over his front, but his backside was in full view, and there would literally be feces dropping on the floor as they rolled to the shower room.

The other places I went to weren't bad. I spent part of the semester in the emergency room and part at the cancer center. The nursing home was by far the worst, and it was what made me change my mind about going into health care.

[wootsie73 0]

As a nurse, I feel very strongly about this myself. I'm an RN and I can tell you there is no way I would EVER work in a nursing home. First of all, all of them are under staffed. It doesn't matter how expensive the home is to the patient and/or family, they are under staffed. Governments fault? Maybe to some extent, but I can assure you that most of it is from the greed of the nursing home owners. This has been going on ever since I was a kid and my poor grandmother was in a nursing home, so it's not only something is President Bush's fault. It's been every president we've had in my lifetime. The nursing home owners don't want to pay the staff they have, plus they won't hire enough people to actually take care of the patients properly. No matter how good the aid or nurse is, they are only human and can only do so much in their shift. It's a sad situation, but I'm not sure how to correct the problems either. Here are a few ideas though.

1. Start paying nurses what they deserve to be paid. Nurses are the most under paid professionals in this country for the education they are required to have and the job they do.

2. Stop paying athletes astronomical amounts of money for playing a game. They should make a decent living, but just that, not millions! Spend the money on people who deserve to be paid better, like nurses.

3. Don't support professional athletic teams. If people wouldn't pay tons of money to attend their games, their salaries would go down.

4. Have state and federal mandantory staffing requirements per the acuity and number of patients in both hospitals and nursing homes. Especially at night, they staff much lower because the patients are supposed to sleep at night. Ha! What a joke. I've always worked nights and especially elderly people get confused at night and are much more likely to get out of bed and fall or something.

5. Have the surprise visits as suggested by Tom.

6. But most of all, have huge fines and penalties for not doing complying with the rules properly with no exceptions.

7. Have state and federal facilities to make sure the rules are followed.

This is a really bad problem and we are going to have to do something about it, and soon. The baby boomers are getting older now and the number of senior citizens in this country are going to greatly out number the younger population. You are absolutely right, it won't be long until we are the ones being treated this way. No human being should ever be mistreated in a healthcare facility of any kind. Hopefully, I will never have to put either of my parents in a nursing home. Both my daughter and myself are nurses, so hopefully we will be healthy enough ourselves to care for them at home.

Joan

[kebsa 1]

I couldn't agree with Joan More. I am an RN and early in my career I worked in a nursing home for a very short time- I was so appalled by the conditions that I went to the director of nursing only to be told that no one else was complaining so it must be my inexperience. Very reluctantly I quit, isay reluctantly because I really felt band for the residents but i sensed from my talk with the DON that if ever a problem arose with one of my patients for what ever reason they would blame my in experience. THat place was shut down 2 yrs later!!

Most of the staff there were personal care attendants rather than EN or RN ( LPN's and RN's as you call them), personal care attendants are paid quite poorly so the good ones often do not stay around for long, and the training tends to be superfcial- with bad habits being passed on from worker to worker.

Most facilities here have strict no lift policies to protect both staff and resident- only a lifting machine can be used -they are expensive though. I don't understand the liscensing procedure in the US so It is hard for me to comment but I know that LPN's and RNS have to answer to regulatory boards in the state they are regisitered. If you suspect elder abuse or unethical treatment- contact the regulatory board in your state, i know such complaints are taken seriously here and I would surprised if they are not in the US too.

Do some research and find out what your states laws etc are like in relation to elder abuse, only with increased publicity of the problem will it ever stand a chance of being improved- as much as we may say that no family member, including ourselves are going to end up in a NH- none of us know that for sure- we may have our own health issues that stop us from caring from a relative or mean that we need supported care.

I have cared for 2 parents who both died of cancer in there own home in the past 10 yrs even for someone in the profession caring for a frail family member is incredibly tough to do long term, both physically and mentally

[mrspruett 0]

Wootsie73 is 100% correct! I am an LPN who worked in nursing homes for over 10 years and I can tell you that they are so understaffed that no human being could take adequate care of those people. I truly loved and cared for the residents but one human being can only do so much. I have written nursing assistants up for being intoxicated on the job, yelling at the residents, stealing from them, etc. I could go on and on. It simply is impossible to make a difference in these places. I left nursing because of this reason. I could not bear to see human beings treated like this.

[lisah25 3]

My FIL is in a nursing home, he has Alzheimers. And we make sure someone, us or MIL, is there a LOT. At odd times. We keep a really close eye on him and how he's doing. MIL is there at mealtime a lot. And I feel like this is a pretty good facility overall, but so many aren't, and for patients that no one is checking on, I really wonder.

It's a cause I'm behind.